First of all, I just want to thank everyone for being patient. Some unavoidable issues cropped up over the past few months that caused some serious delay – I won’t bore you with personal issues, but I do very much appreciate the supportive messages that I received from those who were paying attention to my little sidebar updates!

Spring 2016 Open Submission Period

Anyhow, down to business, since I know that many of you are very, very eager to get this new open period cracking. This open period will run from today, March 21st 2016, until May 21st 2016.

This post means that all submissions from the prior open period have been processed. Those of you queued for Crappypasta have been sent emails letting you know of this status. For everyone else, if you did not receive any reply, consider your story rejected. If you are confused, please familiarize yourself with the FAQ – the entire submission process is covered in detail there. Please refrain from leaving whiny/confrontational comments if your story was not accepted; it only serves to make you look bad. Likewise, please resist the urge to send me nasty messages via Contact Us or the submission form if you are upset about your story’s status. Once again, this does you no favors.

Moving on, please note that there are two new sections on the submission form.

The first will allow authors to have me tag their pasta with a “Video Narratives OK” tag – this means that the author is okay with people in the community reading the pasta on their YouTube (or whatever video hosting site) channel. Any further use of their work is still at their individual discretion, and you’ll need to try and contact the author personally.

The second is much the same, but for Crappypasta. If an author has selected YES for the Crappypasta question, they can also request that – if their pasta is posted on Crappypasta – their story receives a “Video Critique OK” tag. This means that community members are free to make video critiques/analysis of the crappypasta in question.

If you have prior pasta that has been posted on the main site and/or Crappypasta and you wish to have either of these tags applied, please reply to your acceptance/Crappypasta email and let me know.

A special note about Parodypasta – as April 1st is fast approaching, if you want your parodypasta considered for this year’s April Fool’s Round-Up, you will need to get it sent in before March 30th. This should be obvious, but I always get stragglers sent in a few days after or the day of April Fool’s. If your story is a parodypasta, make sure to use the parodypasta tag – I will be prioritizing such stories in the queue until March 30th. Note that if you try to abuse this and tag an obviously non-parody submission as a parodypasta just to try and get me to read it first, it will be an automatic rejection once I realize what you’ve done. Don’t be selfish.

Crappypasta Rework & Crappypasta Week

If you frequent Crappypasta at all, you’ll be aware that it recently received an overhaul. You can visit this post for the specifics.

In celebration of this rework – and, yes, as a transparent attempt to get more people active and leaving feedback – from 3/21 to 3/28, I will not be posting new, accepted stories on the main site. Rather, I will be posting daily round-ups of the stories that have been uploaded to Crappypasta each day. Keep in mind that stories are not posted there unless they have clear potential for the main site, so you may find that you really enjoy some of the work that is posted over the course of the week. If you are new to Crappypasta, please familiarize yourself with the various ins and outs of the site – there are multiple ways to leave feedback, as well as a function to upvote stories that readers believe I rejected wrongly. The big rule is that you must keep your criticism constructive – nasty comments that bring nothing to the table will simply be removed during moderation.

To get you started, here are the recent Crappypasta postings from the past few days: